Creative Circumnavigation

 

Today is the first anniversary of my restarting my paper diary, which I had kept from 1997 to 2008. but the new diary is a music diary, where every day I notate some kind of a riff or seed of an idea that I could develop in the future. It's interesting to loop back and revisit those ideas every day, some of which have been fully developed, some of which I never touched. I think it's an interesting and organic way of working that is quotidian. It's a routine that can produce results, just as cultivating a garden does. If you work in this way, there's no writer’s block, no blank canvas, no despairing about not having any ideas. At least you could come up with one idea per day, and in my case, the ideas are abstracted from things that I've written in my diary, so the rhythms of the words are creating the riffs. Sometimes when I develop them, I just use the rhythms and create instrumental or orchestral pieces based on them. Some I've used to generate AI music. 

Now with AI (LLMs) in the loop, I'm able to research what I've written in the past. This is a nice summary:

Benefits and Philosophy of Routines

• Overcoming Blocks and Achieving Flow: Routines provide a consistent path, helping artists overcome creative blocks and enter "flow states" more easily. This consistent engagement cultivates a "dynamo" of creativity.
• - Providing Structure and Coherence: Routines, especially systematic frameworks like the Songdays, impose a coherence that makes disparate ideas appear as part of a unified whole. This allows for the integration of diverse styles and prevents the work from becoming a disorganized pile of ideas.
• - Personal Satisfaction and Meaning: The ultimate aim of a creative routine is to find satisfaction and personal joy in the work itself, independent of external validation. Jerry Saltz:, "If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow".
• Allowing for Evolution and Variation: While providing structure, routines are not meant to be rigid. The author embraces a routine of variation, genre-hopping, and stylistic shifts to avoid boredom and maintain natural motivation. This allows for the constant evolution of work while retaining underlying integrity.

In essence, creative routines, whether structured systems like the Songdays, or broader philosophical approaches to work, serve as the backbone of a productive and authentic creative life, allowing artists to explore, develop, and express their ideas with consistency and intention.